four days until americans cast their ballots for either president obama or governor mitt romney but will it be a fair election un monitors are set to be deployed here in the u.s. to keep an eye on the voting but some officials are threatening to arrest monitors if they show up at polling places in their states the details just ahead. and when americans head to the polls next tuesday some will be voting in the aftermath of hurricane sandy will the storm's damage change the way voters cast their ballots and could lingering power outages keep some people from voting also gather. and while hurricane sandy was racing off the east coast the u.s. supreme court did not take a break the high court heard several big cases including fights and if drug dogs

violate your fourth amendment rights that story coming up. it's friday november second in washington d.c. and you're watching r.t. . all right well lection day is just four days away and the anticipation for this moment is hanging in the air in a short time the power will shift away from those hands of the people in the government and back into the hands of the power of the people where they will decide once and for all which direction they want this country to head already people are casting early voting ballots president obama of course made election history by being the first president to ever vote early but rampant allegations of voter fraud and voter suppression have cast a shadow of doubt over the fairness of this election as a result of the u.n. affiliated group of international auditors called the organization for security and

cooperation in europe has sent election monitors to the u.s. to oversee this process and this has to officials in california in states across the u.s. upset very upset so much so that texas attorney general greg abbott and iowa secretary of state matt schultz are actually threatening to subject the monitors to criminal permanent prosecutions if they are found within one hundred feet of a polling station but why are these state officials so afraid of international oversight to ensure a fair and democratic election process joining me now is the answer is john green bob he's the chief counsel of the lawyers committee for civil rights under law hey there john let's start off by asking why are iowa secretary of state and the texas attorney general so opposed to voting monitors. again things are having me. i really don't know it's really silly the monitors from europe have been more during

. our elections for the last several years and be meeting with them to morrow and there is never been a problem like this before would you consider this a double standard considering the fact that the u.s. is advocating this group the o.s.c. and they're also advocating them this group going into other countries the fifty six other states that are in countries that are participating in this and saying hey you can go ahead and monitor their elections here but when it comes to us we are fine we don't need any help. well. you've you've talked about the to sort out their texas attorney general in the secretary of state and it's really unfortunate really gives us a black eye as a country and we should be transparent about our elections and have people in europe in the us the world know that we run elections in a way that's going to be fair to people and john one thing that i do have to say is

that what we are seeing in this election cycle rather than any other i would say is allegations of voter suppression of caging of purging of voter fraud so given all of these allegations i mean the iowa secretary of state matched false alone he actually found a list or he says he found a list of a three thousand five hundred eighty two nonsense of citizens that he thinks would be voting in their election so given all of these accusations does it make sense to have these international monitors. well you know it's a good idea if it's a good idea it's a good a good idea to be able to show the world that we run a fair election system and you know we do expect most people to be able to vote on election day without a problem and for those who don't buy organization is part of a coalition the large protection coalition and we run a hotline one eight six six our vote and we like people it's available for anybody

to call if they have an amp or any problems and we will try to help people work through the problems they have an election day and john certainly what we're seeing is a lot of people having problems getting the i.d.'s with all of the flu of new voter i.d. laws coming into play here but i do want to ask you what do these voting monitors what real jurisdiction do they have if any in calling on voter fraud in sovereign elections it's really not their job to interfere and to be to be clear what they're there to do is they're there to observe and they and what will happen is they'll go where and they'll watch the elections and various states across the country and they'll come back with a report based on based on what they've seen they're not going to be the idea is when you're an observer you're not in there to interfere if used if you see something that isn't going right and that really demonstrates how silly the officials in iowa in texas a ban is that these observers are not going to be there to try to interfere with

the election anyway now one argument that we have heard for these people not being allowed in this election cycle are not being allowed is that first of all their opinions don't matter second of all that the polling places are too crowded and they can only handle a certain amount of people talk about the what they would be doing what they would be observing because from my understanding what these observers do is simply sit back they're kind of like a fly on the wall and they kind of watch and see what happens they don't interfere . process in any way and i do also find it interesting just as a little side note that you know media cameras are allowed in these polling stations they're like polling the ballots out of the people's hands right as they're printing to kind of find out how the precincts are doing but at the same time they're not interfering but these these monitors are. you're absolutely right the whole idea of the observers is that there are flies on the wall they're there they're taking notes they're not trying to call attention to themselves they're not

trying to create any issues at the polling place and there may be a few point places here and there that can't stand that are so tight that they can't hold another person or two but i'm sure that's not a problem and far away the bulk of polling places cross the country because really if things are that it's going to be a problem for voters to if there are long lines or a lot of people trying to vote at the polling place and there are problems you probably shouldn't have your polling place in a room where you can read an extra person or two and one of the really interesting points also to bring up is that a lot of these people that are raising the biggest fos about this are republicans we've got greg abbott gale republican congressman. mack and also we've got the iowa secretary of state matt schultz so it's very interesting we're going to have to watch to see if this plays out there's forty four servers that are coming but for now we just have to see how how this plays out chief counsel of the lawyers

committee for civil rights under law thank you so much for joining us thank you megan. and with less than one hundred hours to go the countdown to election night continues but when you head to the ballot box on tuesday don't be surprised when you see names on the election ballot other than president obama and mitt romney there are many other candidates that are vying for a spot in the commander in chief position that may not be getting the same amount of coverage from mainstream news on maryland's ballot for instance there are twenty names among those other hopefuls are libertarian party candidate gary johnson and green party candidate dr jill stein and speaking of those two they'll be going head to head at live at nine pm right here at our studio next monday november fifth as part of the free as part of the free and equal elections foundation second round of third party debates as you may recall our team has hosted. and other

a host of other organizations have aired the first round of the base which included constitution parties virgil goode and justice party president. presidential pick rocky anderson now the debate will also feature a pre-debate panel at. full of notable journalists and hosted by of course the big pictures tom hartman tom will be joined by sam seeder amber lyon martha allison and matt welch so as the tight race between president obama and the republican nominee mitt romney makes its final push to the electorial finish line today and right here to our t.v. in order to get the latest that you won't find on the mainstream media. all right now as the water levels begin to recede from the superstorm known as sandy the question remains whether the franken storm will have a lingering effect on the other major forces coming out ahead of tuesday's elections now the lori of the residents lori harshness took that question and many

others to the streets of brooklyn to see what new yorkers had to say about the election and sandy's effects on it. new york was hit hard by hurricane sandy will it affect the way new yorkers vote or the way they look at the issues this week let's talk about that i was a county alan sixty floor and i seen every day there would just be water. water everywhere the beach was in the street people should know by know. what's going on when this type of storm come so how to build a house a lot of people build a whole thread no not come a stop happen every couple of years or whatever you got to be big and now it's happening more and more crazy climate change of balance we should start building even stronger and go how did this storm change your mind about any of the issues like climate change or anything like that. in terms of

what. was his name romney romney. gathering cans of food. it was said about we don't need. buildable war in which i used to going to vote on tuesday. that no. the city could have been wiped away if the voting polls still stand i have to be the lopping not going good on local say for people of their homes and housing and thereby saving i know i want to do not i lost my home and i say mr romney. thinking about you know you think about what am i going to do you know do you think the government has handled the storm well no how could they have done better they could have gotten the subway running a lot quicker but you think that they have anything to do with how much water is down there and no i think they're just really slow to respond i mean the whole thing with the buses over here is ridiculous and it's unconstitutional that you have to have three people in a car. reacted to it it seems to be getting. seem to be.

yes so if you think that obama's looking better than romney right now. i think mitt romney is a much bigger natural disaster than hurricane sandy and i hope people realize that vote for obama you don't think there's anything wrong with obama i think there's plenty wrong in terms of his. foreign policy in the mideast but unfortunately he's the lesser evil the bottom line is this is been a tough time for new york city and most of us are looking forward to putting this hurricane and the election behind us. and now onto a story that may have missed the mainstream news during the super storm coverage we saw the east coast essentially shut down in the wake of hurricane sandy this week

however as many were ordered to shut down operations and remain indoors especially those in the government and unlikely group decided to go on with business as usual the supreme court braved the elements this week choosing to hear oral arguments on a ray of issues everything from warrantless wiretapping to the use of drug dogs to search was on the table so should we be paying closer attention to the outcome of these cases well to answer that joining me now is the senior editor of reason jacob sullum hey there jack of first things first give us a rundown of these notable cases that were up for debate in court this week. well wednesday the court heard two cases involving drug sniffing dogs which raised two questions one is how reliable does a dog have to be for his alerts to justify a search in the mechanism of vehicle search and the other case had to do with a dog sniffing at home is that you know so constitute

a certain sort of thing you need a warrant for or is that just an examination of odors in the air that was not part of warrants and then the other case that was interesting brought some of the british perspective best to do with the foreign intelligence surveillance act which as of g. doesn't authorize warrantless surveillance of international communications involving people in the united states and the question this report is considering right now is not is that constitutional it's can anybody. sue over there. is anyone have standing to challenge this law or is just the sort of thing we have to let go because. nobody has the search and we also know that they are. doing a some type of legislation some type of questioning about license plate scanners that police used to patrol but on the surface of each one of these cases they seem completely different but they all kind of start to deal with the same thing really

and that is american privacy the justices didn't seem to be happy with the obama administration's arguments in the case against fice a for instance so is there a possibility that the court will side with the a.c.l.u. for that. well i there seem to be at least three justices who are sympathetic to the arguments from the people challenging the law student anthony kennedy is often the swing vote so it's going to see people that they will say yes the people challenging the law who are lawyers. human rights activists. who play and the flame that they have they're worried about being monitored the band standing to sue which means the case can be can proceed and in the lower courts it's conceivable they will say that because otherwise this issue of the fourth amendment is never going to be resolved whether it's ok to have these warrantless as warrantless monitoring probably will never be resolved if they decide that i just don't have standing and the cases with the dogs basically expect something dogs have become

a pretext that parents police man french into probable cause for a search in the case of a vehicle search they can bring the dogs in under previous been for owings or any kind of traffic stop it stop is justified to bring the dogs in for the evidence and once the dog alerts which means he does whatever the cop says he does when he thinks is most drugs the cop can search the car now that alert may or may not be real it could be completely think vicious it could be a mistake on the cops part it could be that the dog is responding to the cops juice because like obviously a suspicious that's what he wants to search the car so the thought made sense that once into a light so basically the dog becomes a license to search where the cop wants on the case of a house which is even scarier if they can bring dogs right homes with that means that a dog even if it doesn't really indicate anything about the dog smells can be enough to get a warrant to search some of these oh i know that's he's pretty scary i do want to

break down these two cases a little bit to explain to our audience a little bit about what's going on so the first case was basically florida versus r.d.s. and what happened there was that a police officer and his dog was outside of the house and the dogs smelled drugs within the private. yes and so they said that that was probable cause to go ahead and search it now in the second case what happened was that it's basically it that the dog and they want to know overall if dogs are certified to be able to make these cases and what some people are arguing is that the dogs are more likely to respond to what their handlers kind of emotions are then what they are their senses are selling them now back in the day in one thousand nine hundred three that kind of ruling that said that the dogs are allowed to go ahead and sniff in airports and sniff cars for incense says that you know dogs sniff smell senses are infallible that we can trust them but we also know that they're and that no they're not infallible these times and there are

a lot of cases where they're calling up false positives so the real problem here is questioning whether or not these dogs are constitute a warrant or not and i write well you know more or less i mean the whole premise of the supreme court decision saying that a dog snow is not a server when we can do it at will is that you will accurately to use the contraband here or not that has turned out to be not the case dogs can have very high failure rates there is restrictions in the point you made about. the handlers choose being picked up by the they did a study where they have police handlers walk their dogs to various routes where drugs supposedly written in fact there were no drugs but the police related to believe that it's certainly patients that were more pieces of paper there were drugs and those are much more likely to falsely look at those locations where the police thought they were then at other locations even look asians that have slim jims had with them sort of distracted so that's very powerful evidence that the

fact that police officers expectations are either consciously or subconsciously were influenced out of names and essentially that means that the police and the dog between them or at least get the the officer can get permission from the dog to search and it can be wherever he wants including a house i mean on the out of the other things relating to whether you need a warrant to bring the dog around somebody is dorset. and when i hear the things that i do want to ask about it i kind of move the conversation to is this license plate scanner cyclist can you briefly explain what happened there what developments came out of it and why people are so upset in the first place well basically this isn't police are collecting in an automated fashion information that they could do radically right they could just observe this they could write down every license plate number that went by so the theory here is that this is ok you don't need a warning signs because this is public information is probably visible but it starts to become something analogous to g.p.s. tracking is a case involving yes tracking of what's required in january where they said you

need a warrant to actually get the records some of these car why are the guys running around but anybody can observe that in that public information but they said there is no well part of the court said no because it's a trespass you have to have these parties attach it but but there also seems to be a majority decision that the nature and volume of the information collected even if anywhere the guy goes in public you click so much information by tracking him say over a month everywhere he goes that you know a great deal about the same thing goes for the kind of license plate tracking that can tell you about so many cars are going to have to end it there i really appreciate your time obviously there's a lot of going on and that's if that's going on within the supreme court take a solemn senior editor at reason thank you so much if you. and speaking of law enforcement and lawsuits during a career day presentation at a new mexico middle school a police officer shot a ten year old boy with a taser what was the crime that the boy committed while he refused to watch the

cop's car during a demonstration while this happened last may the news came out when the lawsuit was filed this week i'll be half of the boy the shooting of two barbs into the ten year old's chest was allegedly an accident as motor transportation officer chris webb thought the weapon was unloaded he jokingly pointed the taser at the boy after he said he didn't want to watch the patrol officers car and officer webb said let me show you what happens to people that don't listen to the police he then proceeded to shock the boy with an equivalent of fifty thousand volts into that little boy's body as a consequence the boy lost consciousness he still has scars from the barbs on his chest according to the lawsuit and officer webb was suspended for three days as a consequence. all right well wells fargo is america's fourth largest bank but according to a new report part of the growth strategy for the bank has been investing in

corporations that make money imprisoning members of the target customer base that is latino it's a new report from national poll from the national people's action and the public accountability initiative cleverly titled jails fargo gives evidence that the bank is trying to have it both ways for at least a decade wells fargo executives have touted latino customers as a strong segment of their business strategy including targeted advertisements and latino community outreach for instance according to the report wells fargo processed one point eight billion dollars in remittances in two thousand and eleven now this seems like good stuff but what none of the latino directed advertisements are saying is that wells fargo funds the private prison industry companies like the geo group the corrections corporation of america and management and training corporation what do these things have to do with one another well to explain the connection between wells fargo's latino com customer outreach and the private

prison industry i was joined earlier earlier by axel caballero founder of quantum a. the connection between the latino community and the private prison industry is one that has started pretty much as we saw the surge of s b ten seventy and copycat laws around the country where they were detaining immigrants and sending them to private prison facilities and immigration detention facilities and turning a profit based on contract sometimes up to two hundred dollars a night per immigrant detain and these facilities obviously the two largest ones are the geo group as well as corp america which is profit in the five billion dollar amount a year between both combined that's a direct link and they actually report after report says that they actually lobbied to have those anti immigrant laws passed because they need immigrants to fill those

detentions in order to turn a profit our great axle and now the report less sun some service says that wells fargo offers to let you know customers well site offers an advertising geared toward hispanics they're accepting might take a lot of the take a lot of white identification cards issued to formal foreign national partnerships with latin latino community groups and remittance services so can us playing a little bit all of these services including the meticulous and why they are so bad or so hypocritical. well of first of all we have to understand that the marketing tactics that wells fargo has done the last few years are very very directed to latino community because they know that the base is very important for their ultimate goal which is profits they know that there's a customer mase base there and we're talking about a strong portion of immigrants in this country that send money back home and they use services like wells fargo to do so now that is very cynical and hypocritical because the same company that is providing the service isn't making

a profit on that and it's also investing in ownership of stocks of c.c.a. and geo group as well as funding lines of credit to these corporations and they're making a profit by incarcerating the same people that they're making a profit in allowed to send money back home it is a cyclical thing and it is very cynical that now they're moving to this marketing campaign style that is still there or knowledge is power i'm your friend these are very cynical approaches to be honest and really the latino community is starting to wake up and say listen you know you can take a two pronged approach with us either you know tog directly and tell us exactly what's going on and act like you have to ask you though with these incentives like meticulous lika and they have by the way are the first of banks to ever accept not take with us and also the rennison says does it actually make sense for the latino community to pull out when they're offering so many things to do help the community

. it does make sense and here's why first because it is a strong message that we need to send to wells fargo that well these services would promote a better understanding of how latinos are using the banking services you can do that and at the same time use the profit for the different modes you can do that in the same time that the other and incarcerate immigrants and basically also with lending practices for example we just see in the lawsuit in new york that they are being sued for mortgage fraud you can't really as a company expect that the latino community is going to be by your side and offer supposedly beneficial services like might think what i was which are i g.'s or consul area that they can show to you know to particularly open a bank account or to send money back home. and then the same time know that you are

profiting from the mystery that comes with the incarceration and the separation of families in private prisons but actual i do have to push back just a little bit and we don't want to play devil's advocate here for just a second and ask you it kind of sounds to me like what wells fargo is saying by supporting both the latino community as well as the crackdown or crackdown on the community by supporting private prison industry is that they're supporting legal immigrants to use and their services they're encouraging and they're making it easier what there aren't supporting is illegal immigrants coming in here and abusing the system allegedly so kind of connect that because i am trying to draw a difference between these illegal immigrants that are using wells fargo and the illegal immigrants that they're locking up by supporting the private prisons. well it's interesting that you mention that because of two reasons first you know during a lot of the actions some approaches that we have taken on through our immigrants for sale campaign directed at wells fargo they kept saying but their policies or

that you know our protests should be directed at the federal government and the immigration authorities well then don't take a stance on dividing immigrants into two categories that's number one and number two it is absolutely a farce that they are really making that distinction because they're taking money from undocumented immigrants as well as some documented immigrants you know when you send money back home you don't actually need to prove or show anything new you can just be an immigrant here to use their services and send money back home but like you would with western union they care about profits that's the bottom line it is about profit is not about immigration policy and so what we need to do is tell been that bad frost that comes with the prize and that prize in the latino community support. but i just ask you once again some apparently business standpoint bennett community is the second fastest growing asian americans just overtook them this year the so there's money to be made in appealing to that

community and there's also money to be made in appealing to the private prison industry as they are in fact a cash cow it's a multi-billion dollar industry at this point but we already know that ethics is an afterthought for businesses like this i mean look at the mortgage crisis for instance so from a strictly business standpoint it does make sense does it not to invest in both. you have a valid that's where we have the bottom line right when does business practices becomes problematic and when they become abusive and what we believe is that wells fargo business practices have become abusive and that it had one and they're trying to court latino support and particularly latino business you can on the other side say well yeah i'll take your money but also put you in prison i'll take your money but also take your home i'll take your money but i also separate your families that is absolutely what is the problem right now that we're see.